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There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it

Seems odd that he wouldn’t know about Sourcehut (2018) and Gitea (2016).

Mind you I use (and thus pay for) Sourcehut: the vast majority of folks won't be cross shopping Sourcehut and GitHub. As it stands now the UX is (to put it charitably) bad. There's a lot to like, but overall Sourcehut is disjointed rather than cohesive. The workflow itself is also an acquired taste. With a bit of spit and polish Sourcehut could be quite nice to use, but it's not there yet. Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

The others mentioned are more or less knockoffs of GitHub, because at one point GitHub was quite worth emulating.

Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

Drew would never.

Yeah, ideally he wouldn't.

I bet there will be more sourcehut customers than this person’s new offering.

He doesn’t even know his competitors.

Very possible. SourceHut is great and seems to be most popular with developers and open source teams (although I'm sure they also have corporate users too). We are more focused on companies and enterprises. These are different segments of the market with different needs. The former also tends to have higher user counts with lower average deal size, while the latter has lower user counts with very high average deal size.

With that being said, Gitness is a rebranding of Drone, which has 10,000+ active installations so I would say we are off to a pretty good start!

And Codeberg (2019), which was based on Gitea until they forked it into Forgejo (2022).

Codeberg is a service not a separate software. Just like you wouldn't count salsa.debian.org or framagit.org as separate from GitLab, they are the same with maybe some local customization.

At this point Codeberg is clearly distinct from Gitea and is more thoroughly open-source in its nature than anything Harness is going to bring out, but yes, you could combine it with Forgejo if that feels more fair.

At this point Codeberg is running Forgejo not Gitea.

Yes, that's what I was saying.

This is probably my fault. Internally at Harness I have been hyping this launch as a "once in a decade" event. That unfortunately got translated into "first in a decade" when it hit the press. I do think the launch of a new, major open source Source Control system with kind of investment (12 full time engineers and counting) is a rare event, but I do wish it was worded differently. Nothing we can do about it now!

How does Gitness differ from already existing open source alternatives, such as Gitlab, Gitea, Gogs, Forgejo, Codeberg, Gitweb?

Gitness actually launched in 2012 under the name Drone, with a focus on continuous integration. So Gitness has a very strong, mature pipeline engine that is also very popular in the Gogs and Gitea community (Gitness is backward compatible with any Drone yaml). Of course, this is just our initial launch which is a very important milestone, but we have a lot of feature gaps and a lot of work to do to make our Code Hosting solution a more interesting replacement. Stay tuned.

Edit: if you have feature requests, let us know!

Also Forgejo (2022)…

They definitely know about Gitea – though they don't acknowledge it, it's partly based on Gitea. https://github.com/harness/gitness/pull/3364/files#diff-4673...

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